PROOF OF CONCEPT FOR PAIR BASED APPROACH FOR SWARM ROBOTICS

Abstract

Many cases exist where teams of agents in a multi-agent system perform better than individual agents acting alone. In swarm robots, a large number of low-cost robots with limited functionality interact with each other and the environment to result in a more complex emergent behavior capable of performing tasks collaboratively. There exist many robotic swarms composed of single agents however, the study of swarms composed of modular robots and/or smaller teams, each acting as an independent unit, is a relatively new area of study. This thesis provides a proof of concept for a pair-based approach for swarm robots where two individual robots act as a single unit in the swarm called “duos,” and the emergent behavior of the swarm consisting of these duos is studied by making concentric circles pattern using duos. For small swarm sizes, the duo swarm converged 31.6 % faster than the single-agent swarm.